[5.4] Protection Warrior

As no guide has been written yet for the Protection spec, this useful thread has been stickied as un up-to-date state of the spec.
Do not hesistate to ask questions, even if we don't have a guide we have plenty of people able to help.
- Senen

Edited: 09/21/13Q: I heard about this new ability called Riposte that makes avoidance stat stacking viable in 5.4, but I also heard that Protection Warriors benefit from Crit right now. Should I stack Avoidance or Crit or Mastery?

A: At the moment there is no wrong answer. There are pluses and minuses to each and you should really decide what works for you and your raid.

Mastery:
+ The physical damage intake is very smooth with almost no spikes
+ Higher Mastery stats in 5.4 resulting in many crit blocks which in turn give 10 rage
- Lower benefit from Riposte since your avoidance will be much lower then someone who is stacking avoidance

Parry/Dodge:
+ Lowest overall damage taken
+ Damage done increases significantly
+ High rage generation due to high crit from Riposte (Shield Slams and Devastates crits = 10 rage) and revenge spam due to revenge CD resetting when you dodge/parry and attack
-Spikes in damage taken which may result in being more difficult to heal

Crit:
+Highest overall DPS
+Great for off-tanking when you will not be tanking for the vast majority of the fight
-Highest overall damage taken

Q: So I decided to stack avoidance. How should I balance my parry and dodge rating?

A: First of all, whenever you are talking about balancing Parry and dodge rating, you always want to use rating NOT percentage.

There are 2 ways to approach this.
1: Balance them using something like THIS to have an "optimal" balance for diminishing returns. (Source: Muuku)

2. Throw as much into Parry as possible to take advantage of the HOLD THE LINE GLYPH. The downside is that you lose out on some avoidance due to the DR on parry although the amount you lose is very little (a few 10ths of a percentage of avoidance).

Q: I'm planning on playing my Warrior as Protection this patch, but my tank set is very undergeared. Would it be better to use my DPS gear until I can upgrade to higher ilvl tanking gear?

A: The DPS gear will be just fine. As mentioned above, crit stacking may not be ideal for your situation, but it is better then using tanking gear that is a tier or 2 behind.

Q: Should I still Hit/Exp hard-cap?

A: YES!!! Always

Q: What is the difference between Shield Block and Shield Barrier? Should I be spamming Shield Barrier if I am stacking avoidance stats?

A: No matter how you are gearing, you want to keep a 100% possible uptime on you Shield Block if there is any blockable damage incoming. The extra rage should be used on Barriers in between your Shield Blocks.

There are exceptions to this as always.
-If high unblockable damage is incoming then it may be a good idea to pool your rage to have full Shield Barriers up for that ability
-If your vengeance level is high enough that you can spam barriers and take literally zero damage
-If you are dangerously close to dying, Barrier can be used as an "Oh Shit" button

Q: What are the BIS trinkets?

A: Trinkets, as always, are very situation. 90% of the time there will never be 2 BIS trinkets that you use for every fight.

Original Post (Leaving this here for the sake of clarity if you choose to read the entire thread.)

After many posts and (quite a few) complaints, it looks like Blizzard has finally smiled down upon us. I'm sure it will take time to math out what is the most appropriate but the possibility of a Crit>Mastery>*.* or Mastery>Crit>*.* setup sounds absolutely fantastic. It'll be interesting to see how it will play out on the PTR but the possibilities sounds amazing.

Is it just me or does 30% of blocked damage as heal look extremely strong? Makes crit blocks essentially an 80% damage reduction on blockable attacks that don't oneshot you? Combine that with 5.4 mastery levels.

Let´s say you receive 100 damage, which you block. that would be 30 damage. 30% of those 30 damage would be gained as heal, which would be ROUGHLY 10 damage. 10 damage are 1/10th of the damage total. If you block criticylly, you´d heal yourself for 20 points, being 1/5th of the damage total. still means you´d take 60 damage to the face instead of 70 (normal block) or 20 damage to the face instead of 40 (critical block).

This. is. awesome.

Now I wondern, and this is my real question: What will performe nicest? Mastery over all, ignoring hit and exp, hit/exp still > mastery or, our new candidate.. crit. Since Devestate, which is our filler, and Shieldbash will trigger enrage (which makes you gain rage, just reminding), it would be a boost to our damage and survivability. I´m really excited how this works out.

Originally Posted by Ryan Cailan Ebonheart

I've done nothing wrong. I'm not the one with the problem its everyone else that has a problem with me.

Is it just me or does 30% of blocked damage as heal look extremely strong? Makes crit blocks essentially an 80% damage reduction on blockable attacks that don't oneshot you? Combine that with 5.4 mastery levels.

Yes it does sound op if it will count for critblocks as i currently can get about 70% mastery buffed, imagine with the coming gear! And thank god for enraged regen going back

Actually I see no love from the crit change. Prot warriors have 5% chance to crit flat. We may see an increase in enrage uptime of 2-3%.
In offtank scenarios we will benefit the most since atm we do not get enraged as a tank when not tanking.

You are allowed to take crit/haste as secondary stats if your defensive abilities profit from it. (Monk, Paladin). Warriors just don't.

A tank is a tank, is a tank. If there is no benefit from crit other then doing more dps stay away from it or you are playing the wrong role/class!
Vengeance-whoring is soooo bad. We got tanks that actually sit down to take are crit or sit in fire. WTF. That is retarded.

I tank with a monk buddy. He sits in full crit + dps meta. I sit in full mastery + tank meta. Of course I'm greedy. His dps is insane and his defensive abilities don't loose much in value. If he is not tanking I can barely keep up in threat with just doing my default rotation as best as I can while actually keeping defensive abilities up. Kind of hilarious atm :/.

The first T16 tank bonus is absurd...I doubt it will make it through. Totally OP.

Actually I see no love from the crit change. Prot warriors have 5% chance to crit flat. We may see an increase in enrage uptime of 2-3%.
In offtank scenarios we will benefit the most since atm we do not get enraged as a tank when not tanking.

You are allowed to take crit/haste as secondary stats if your defensive abilities profit from it. (Monk, Paladin). Warriors just don't.

A tank is a tank, is a tank. If there is no benefit from crit other then doing more dps stay away from it or you are playing the wrong role/class!
Vengeance-whoring is soooo bad. We got tanks that actually sit down to take are crit or sit in fire. WTF. That is retarded.

I tank with a monk buddy. He sits in full crit + dps meta. I sit in full mastery + tank meta. Of course I'm greedy. His dps is insane and his defensive abilities don't loose much in value. If he is not tanking I can barely keep up in threat with just doing my default rotation as best as I can while actually keeping defensive abilities up. Kind of hilarious atm :/.

The first T16 tank bonus is absurd...I doubt it will make it through. Totally OP.

Crit = Enrage = More Rage = Active Mitigation

It's hard to see what will be the best stat prio but yeah, changes looking good so far.

Enrage does not proc rage back-to-back. There is a 3 second delimiter that prevents rage from generating rapidly. That is basically to prevent the rage-spam when fighting 20 white mobs.

Additionally it is no problem at all to do the full Shield Block rotation. The only benefit would be that you could now use Shield Barrier ontop of a block.

But who actually tried doing that knows that there is a problem. Once your block is on CD and you are sitting on 40-60 rage and use barrier you will deplete your rage pool completly. This will most likely delay your next Shield Block because you will find it very hard to get your rage back up to 60 quickly. That is especially the case if a mob is casting and thus not generating revenge procs or if you got a bad luck with procing SS from Devastate.

Enrage does not proc rage back-to-back. There is a 3 second delimiter that prevents rage from generating rapidly. That is basically to prevent the rage-spam when fighting 20 white mobs.

Additionally it is no problem at all to do the full Shield Block rotation. The only benefit would be that you could now use Shield Barrier ontop of a block.

But who actually tried doing that knows that there is a problem. Once your block is on CD and you are sitting on 40-60 rage and use barrier you will deplete your rage pool completly. This will most likely delay your next Shield Block because you will find it very hard to get your rage back up to 60 quickly. That is especially the case if a mob is casting and thus not generating revenge procs or if you got a bad luck with procing SS from Devastate.

Well, they will probably keep the icd of rage for crit blocks, but will make rage gain from crit specials not tied to it. If it were tied crit would have next to zero def value, and then... Why would they bother to do the change?

The size of the Enrage pie is fixed at 100%. With a well geared tank and a fight where the boss is on you 100% of the time you can expect a 45%-55% enrage uptime from critical block alone leaving a potential 45%-55% additional enrage time. Assuming crit was the second most valuable secondary stat behind mastery (I don't belive it is) it would have to compete with mastery for enrage generation.

The problem is these stats act negatively, that is the more mastery you have the less value you get from crit for dps and vice versa due to overlapping enrages. As Zorker pointed out the only time you would get max benefit from crit for dps is when off tanking since mastery based enrages are removed.

The above is of course not taking in to effect the base damage increase from crit, only enrage damage.

As for the defensive benefits of crit I calculated the rage per second generation for both crit and mastery for the following logs. They arn't my own as I am taking a break from serious raiding atm.

The variations in mastery rage generation can be attributed to % of combat time with boss on the warrior tank as well as shield block usage. I feel the best two to use are Tortos and Megaera since the tank has close to 100% incoming damage.

Aoe damage aside incoming damage for tortos is 100% melee. In this situation where shield block usage is high we can see that crit just outperforms mastery in terms of rage regeneration. This does not of course take in to consideration masteries primary usage which is block.

With Megaeta shield barrier is used more often and we can see rage return from mastery is much lower. In truth on this encounter crit is competing more with dodge and parry though I can't think of a way to compare these stats without modeling.

So in a situation where mastery is being used to its full potential we see crit barely outperforming it in rage generation. When you take in to consider rage generation is just a benefit of mastery rather than it's primary purpose I think its safe to say that crit will be a very poor defensive stat.

Which leads me to the question I posted originally earlier today. What is this change meant to address. We are not going to want crit on our gear nor will the change bring us anywhere near close to the damage output of other tanks. I hope they don't use this change as a license to put crit gear on our tier.

Which leads me to the question I posted originally earlier today. What is this change meant to address. We are not going to want crit on our gear nor will the change bring us anywhere near close to the damage output of other tanks. I hope they don't use this change as a license to put crit gear on our tier.

Someone said it before, maybe it's *something* for the situation when we're offtanking. Can't see how we don't want to just cap mastery (~ 22k IIRC) and add more stamina (45% of your maximum hitpoints healed with each impending victory!) and/or avoidance afterwards.

2 piece looks really solid, that's a bonus we can expect from the final tier. But that bonus alone can't save us, where are the much needed changes to keep all tanks in line?

We're going to see more ramp up if this doesn't play out the way we initially think.

This is very much an attempt to change the protection warrior to follow the model of the other tanks, especially Monks and Paladins. The change to Enrage ICD based on SS & Deva crits I think is a foregone conclusion. If this change does not make it justifiable, or even semi-justifiable, then more will come. This is all perfectly align with my prediction that dodge/parry will be removed from gear in 6.0. Everything seems to point towards it.

Also, I'm willing to give up some mitigation to be a competitive DPS in my raid as a protection warrior. We're already an excellent mitigation tank-- if I need to throw some of that away: I'm fine with it, as I imagine other progression based protection warriors are.

We need to keep talking about this though. We need to make sure Blizzard knows what the consensus is before 5.4 drops and the buff wasn't significant enough.

It's a step in the right direction making crit borderline useful for prot warriors, but as others pointed out it might not be enough, maybe if crit contributed in a small way to Crit block chance or the ammount blocked by crit blocks.

Since Monks get the whole dps + mitigation cakes and get to eat them too, it would only be fair to give prot warriors (and DKs and pallies) the same offensive gearing option. Avoidance gear is a totally outdated concept anway, no gives a crap about parry/dodge these days.

Why the hell should a mainspec monk dps be able to switch to his tank spec and do exceptionally well with the same gear set, but as a mainspec dps warrior I get shafted hard going prot? It's fun tanking in dps gear, but it's disheartening that none of the crit or haste on my gear can contribute AT ALL to my survival.

And I don't see why a prot warrior should be doing less than half the dps of a Brewmaster with avoidance/mastery gear when they can also mitigate just as well as a warrior (propably better.. they can stagger HC Lei Decapitates to the face over and over rotating small cds, warrior is lucky to survive 1 with all cds up).

So after crit they also need to figure out how to make haste a thing. They could always bring back auto-attack rage, but then again rage gen is already spread all over the place as it is.. Maybe if auto-attacks could proc Sword and Board? Would be pretty sweet.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs..

as a DPS warrior, its like you prot warriors are mexicans crossing the border:

"Dey took our gears!"

I hope the changes go through. I have been tanking LFR in my DPS gear and it has been a blast. This 'should' make prot warriors very desireable. On topic: are we still looking like we can mastery cap and how would the t15 dps 4 DPS set bonus play out with active mitigation in the new model?